“A consideration of moment is that this decline in values does not signify a corresponding decline in quantities. On the contrary, in yarn manufactures, with an actual increase in the exported weight, there is a decrease in the cash return. Thus in bleached and dyed cotton yarn and twist there was a qualitative rise between 1893 and 1895 from 36,105,100 lb. to 40,425,600 lb., with a fall in the value thereof from £1,862,880 to £1,832,477. Between 1865 and 1895 the average price per lb. of cotton yarn declined from 23·98d. to less than 8·85d. ’Tis a good enough explanation of the vanishing dividends, the low wages, the lack of enterprise and initiative.” Mr. Williams must either be very innocent, or expect his readers to be. He apparently has forgotten that the most important element in the price of cotton yarn is the price of the raw cotton out of which the yarn is spun. What the Lancashire spinner cares about is not the absolute price of yarn or the absolute price of raw cotton, but the margin between the two. If that be satisfactory his profit is secure. Therefore, the mere statement that the prices of yarn have fallen so much in so many years, by itself explains nothing. As a matter of fact the price of cotton yarn has followed, and continues to follow, very closely the price of raw cotton, the spinners’ margin remaining fairly constant. It is useless to go back to 1865, when the most careless economist might surely have remembered that the American war made cotton dear, and machines were less efficient than they now are. But I have taken the trouble to work out for the last ten years, from figures kindly supplied by the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, the average margin between the price of a pound of standard yarn (32’s twist) and a pound of standard cotton (middling American). The result shows that while the spinners’ margin was slightly less in 1895 than in 1893, it stood at practically the same figure as in 1892 and 1894, and was a good deal higher than it had been in 1886. So that here again there is no real foundation for Mr. Williams’s statement. THE DAYS OF BIG FORTUNES.